大象传媒

This story was written on behalf of Billy Davis, with his permission, by Mark Jeffers.
I was sixteen whenever the war started and I served my time in Harland and Wolff Shipyard throughout it. My family lived in Lisburn and whenever there was an air raid, we used to get up out of bed and go up the street to what was called the Ferrywell, a large area of open ground. There was an air raid shelter hit on Percy Street in Belfast and it killed everyone inside it so we used to go up to the Ferrywell where we thought it was safer. You could see the flashes and bombs being dropped on Belfast from there. But they never came as far as Lisburn, it was never touched. Belfast got it all.
They were after the shipyard all the time. The shipyard was making frigates and destroyers for the British Army during the war and I worked there at that time. I remember a big raid on Belfast one night and they went for the shipyard again. There were three aircraft carriers in the dock when the planes came over. The soldiers who were in the yard rushed onto one and fired its guns at the aircraft. They saved the shipyard that night.
The next morning when I went into work it was terrible. The raid had caused a lot of damage to the workshops in the yard. The roof of the workshop that I worked in was completely knocked in. After that whenever it rained it was desperate because there was no shelter.
All the air raids happened at night and there was a nightshift operating in the yard. A remember a fellow telling mw how he went into the joiners workshop one night and all the workers were on the floor praying. I was glad to work during the day.
Everything was rationed throughout the war and this made it impossible to buy a good suit in Northern Ireland. You could only buy utility clothes that were awful. Instead we would one week travel to the Republic of Ireland on the train and order a suit, then a week or a fortnight later we would put on old trousers and an overcoat and go back to Dublin to collect it. You had to dump the old trousers, as the customs were so strict they would have tried to confiscate the new suit, so you had to wear it home. You always felt great when you had a new suit.
That鈥檚 what many men did. As the Republic of Ireland was a neutral country and wasn鈥檛 officially at war, you could buy all necessities there, such as butter and sausages. The customs at the border with Northern Ireland were very strict though. Customs would stop the train for up to an hour sometimes to make sure nothing was being smuggled in. In fact, people used to hang their sausages and bags of food out the other side of the train so the customs officers couldn鈥檛 see them from the platform! It was very common for people to be taken off the train and searched

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